BTTB-X-Series: Akasha
Ursprünglich bekannt durch ihre "anderen" Platten auf Wall Of Sound, inzwischen aber schon lange nicht mehr dort sondern auf ihrem eigenen Ra Recordings Label: Akasha. Im Mai haben sie endlich wieder ein neues Album veröffentlicht - der Titel ist Love Philtre Magick und die Musik ist wunderschön, lief auch mehrfach bei BTTB.
"The Love Philtre Magick referred to in the album title is an ancient love charm or potion made from natural herbs and plants and is designed like other magical spells to influence events in the mortal realm. Other such scattered throughout the album. Magic can be defined as any attempt to manipulate the natural state of
a physical entity using external forces. Music can be viewed as one of these forces. [...] We have been told some of these new tracks vary in style radically. This may be so but for us they retain an Akashaness central to our manifesto... to make music that will take you into another space as it has done us."

I tried to use examples of artists' who had used samples or pieces of other peoples' work or sounds that weren't of a musical origin as a basis for the term 'cut up'. Obviously i couldn't fit everyone in and there are some glaring omissions from heavyweights like Stockhausen, Raymond Scott, Xenakis, Meat Beat Manifesto, Stock, Hausen & Walkman and a plethora of scratch DJs but it was for the Remix and i didn't want to get too involved in certain areas.
The first section is a sort of mini superchunk in the style you would expect albeit with as many tracks in 10 minutes as you would maybe get in the usual 30 minute slot. After this i wanted to go back to the 40's and the beginning of tape recorders and music concrete and proceed through the century up to 2001 - the year i always peg the 'bootleg' craze first emerging even though records like the EEC's Whipped Cream mixes originally came out in '94.
You could seriously write a thesis on this mix as so many parts cross reference, resample or 'quote' (as Jon Oswald would have it) each other, especially in the hip hop/megamix genre. For instance: Burroughs' theorising on cutting into a phrase in the present makes the future leak out, here a small section of a Coldcut track using the same speech appears underneath and eventually synches up with his words.
Later on two separate Steinski tracks both using the phrase "Heeeeeeere's Jonny" segue into each other shortly after the phrase "Take it away John Cameron" from the Flying saucer record previously sampled by Steinski. (The 'Time becomes a loop' intro to the 2nd Orbital LP seems apt here)
On a lighter note we have Mike Read from Osymyso's 'Pat & Peg' shouting "We're looking for Roy" before jumping to a Freelance Hellraiser track (his real name is Roy) and the trade off of Melle Mel's "Bass" from 'White Lines' with Justins' "Drums" from 'Like I Love You'.
There's over 130 tracks in there somewhere and another 60 or so spoken word samples, over 3 gigs of audio compressed into 39 minutes. The title 'Raiding the 20th Century' is an appropriation of a project Paul Morley & Trevor Horn were to instigate with the Art of Noise that would run for 7 years and encapsulate the different spheres of life from the last 100 years.